Eskimos do NOT have 40 words for snow

A myth perpetuated by a series of linguisticsscholars, starting with Franz Boas in 1911, who reported on four "words" for snow in Eskimolanguage. Eskimo languages form words differently than in English, and there is no one-to-one comparison between the two. In Eskimo, a root will be made into an almost limitless number of "words" by applying multiple suffixes. Boas' reference to the snow words was tied to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and then perpetuated itself as evidence of the link between language categories and thought.